If It Has a Screen, It Can Run Doom. How a Game From 1993 Became a Porting Legend
Key takeaways
- The first-person demon-shooting Doom has some shocking longevity.
- It was developed by id Software on a NeXTcube workstation, but its first release was to IBM PCs running MS-DOS.
- It was also ported to a load of consoles, including the Super Nintendo, Sega Saturn, PlayStation, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
The first-person demon-shooting Doom has some shocking longevity. The video game has been part of tech culture since it launched in 1993, with its signature view of a gun centered of the screen firing at nightmarish pixelated fiends becoming an iconic image in gaming. Even if you've never played, you've seen it. That isn't even necessarily because of nostalgia, although that's a factor. To some extent, it's because Doom can seemingly be played on anything with electricity running through it.
This isn't new. Doom has, essentially, always been a port. It was developed by id Software on a NeXTcube workstation, but its first release was to IBM PCs running MS-DOS. Less than two years after its initial launch, it was ported to OS/2, IRIX, Solaris, MacOS, Linux and Microsoft Windows.
It was also ported to a load of consoles, including the Super Nintendo, Sega Saturn, PlayStation, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. This trend continued for literally decades, and you can buy Doom on your Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5 today, along with PC and, at least for a while, the Nintendo Switch.